BitFenix Prodigy M mATX Case Review

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Prodigy M Detailed Features

Opening the (hinged!) panels gives us a better picture of how hardware is supposed to fit in the Prodigy M.

Above is a picture of the “front” side, if you consider the “front” to be facing the motherboard. From here the general layout becomes a little more apparent – the PSU mounts to the front face of the Prodigy M, with the cables sticking up. A 5.25 bay resides up top, but placing an optical drive here will most likely intrude on either fans, radiators or GPUs as they all would occupy the same space.

The “back” is a little less interesting. The CPU cooler cutout is huge, and will allow installation of aftermarket coolers without removing the motherboard. Other than that, you’ll notice there isn’t a terrible amount of room here for stashing cables – most of those will have to be tied down next to the PSU.

One of the panels contains room for two 2.5″ drives and the wiring for the I/O cluster. To make wiring easier, you may want to swap this panel to be behind the motherboard. The cables are a little long for such a small enclosure, but I suppose that’s better than too short – at least the length allows you to route cables behind or around components and fans.

There’s a design engraved into the heat shield that is mostly cosmetic and helps offset some fingerprints, but as the shield stays underneath the Prodigy M (or is removed entirely) you may not even notice it. It’s nice to see even a small detail like this though, as they could have easily just used an unfinished slab of plastic and called it a day.

Drives are mounted using a rubber grommet and a screw, as pictured above. While not as tool-less as the ITX Prodigy, this is still a relatively quick and easy method of mounting hard drives – they just snap into place once the grommets are installed.

2.5″ drives are also pretty easily installed – and in the case of SSDs, they can be stashed anywhere there is room. In stock trim the Prodigy M has room for five 2.5″ drives: three on this bracket and two on the side panel. There’s a better picture of how drives mount on this bracket in the next section, so let’s begin placing some hardware in the Prodigy M.

1 comment

My favorite mATX case: Corsair 350D. In any mini-ITX or micro-ATX case, power cables are always going to be an issue. I’ve settled on Silverstone Strider modular power supplies, because Silverstone offers an inexpensive “short cable kit” (part number PP-05) that makes working in these cases a lot easier. They even have a modular SFX power supply that’s really nice for mITX builds.